loving the rain
I am a pretty honest person.
Except for that one summer in the 80s.
That summer, I worked at a landscaping company. It was a great job where I could be outside in the warm summer sun all the time. When I got the job, they asked me if I knew anything about trees. I looked them right in the eyes and said that I knew so much about trees it would baffle people.
They never asked any follow-up questions, so the job was mine.
Customers would come in asking about trees, for example, what color a particular tree would turn in the fall. I would just make up a color, knowing full well I wouldn’t be there when fall arrived. I giggle to myself when I think of the backyards of the people who found out the hard way that I was full of shit.
I remember waking up that summer when it was raining, and feeling joyous, as I didn’t need to work on rainy days. It was precious to know that I had an unexpected free day. I could slow down, check in with myself and do whatever I wanted to do. It felt like a magical gift just for me.
There’s something about rain that invites us back into presence.
In yoga philosophy, we talk about santosha — contentment, not because life is puppies and rainbows and sunshine, but because we learn to soften our resistance to what is actually happening.
Rain doesn’t apologize for arriving. It doesn’t ask (and doesn’t care) whether we wanted sunshine instead. It simply falls — nourishing the earth, slowing the world down, asking us to listen differently.
Maybe our practice is the same.
Some days we feel like sunshine, energized and open. Some days we feel less sunny and more slothful, heavy, uncertain, or tired.
Yoga reminds us that every experience is temporary — what the yogis call anitya (uh-NIT-yah) or impermanence. Like weather passing through the sky, our thoughts, emotions, and seasons of life move through us too.
The breath becomes like rain itself: steady, rhythmic, cleansing. Each inhale gathers what we need. Each exhale releases what we no longer have to carry.
So today, instead of wishing it was different than it is, can we let ourselves fully arrive in it?
To smell the raindrops.
To feel the air on our skin.
To hear the gentle or turbulent sounds of rain.
The rain, like our yoga, allows us to trust that growth is often happening underground, long before anything blooms.
